Playing with the Nativity

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One luxury of our modern Western societies is that many of us are able to have a plenitude of Christmas decorations.  The selections in Christmas stories reveal the enduring popularity of nativity scenes, from folk pottery of South America to wood carvings of Asia.  My wife says that as a child her favorites were nativity scenes that allowed her to move unattached figures about.  And, of  course, some of the favorites of children in those scenes are, understandably, the animals.

Seeing a child play with those animals that are a part of Jesus's birth-scene often makes me think of a similar children's toy:  the arks with pairs of animals, based on the story of the flood in the Bible's book of Genesis.  (Christianity shares with Judaism that version of the story of animals being saved; and the figure of Noah as rescuer is also in Islam's Qur'an.)  Young children enjoy animating the animals by moving them about.  And figuring out how to fit all the animals into the ark can be a learning experience.

Our contemporary dictionaries have several definitions for "ark," but one older use of the word endures only in history-recording dictionaries such as the Oxford English.  In the 1700's and 1800's, English gentlemen (and their counterparts in U.S.'s New England) were often collectors of objects from nature:  fossils, plant samples, bones, insects, etc.  If the collector could afford it, he kept those samples in a multi-drawered cabinet that came to be called an "ark."  The Biblical connection was so strong that the wood cabinets were sometimes even designed with a sloping top -- the way the roof of Noah's ark would have to have been sloped so the rain would run off.

Natural scientists of that time period had a "fitting" problem that was even greater than how to fit their growing number of samples into their arks (and even more challenging than children getting toy animals back into their ark).  Namely, figuring out how all the fossils, plants, and animals represented by their samples fit together historically and biologically.  Eventually, Darwin's discovery would prove to be a breakthrough.

This story of the resourcefulness of natural science converges with the resourcefulness of Christianity with its nativity scenes.  That is because the Bible itself does not explicitly depict any animals surrounding baby Jesus in the manger.  Sheep are only referred to indirectly in the Bible's book of Luke; camels are never mentioned in the story of the magi in Matthew; and no donkey is mentioned.  All those animals around the Christmas manger are thus the product of humans' imaginatively interpreting the meaning of the Biblical stories.  It seems as if representing the glory of new creation and the glory of God demanded a more holistic picture -- one that involved a range of animals.

Today, for some of us, another dimension -- another aura -- surrounds those nativity scenes.  Just like Noah, we humans today are trying to rescue animals from extinction by trying to evoke in our human hearts a new birth of the spirit of Creation-Care.  On this ark of planet Earth.

~~~

Do you have any childhood memories involving crèches or living nativity scenes?

(The picture of a nativity is used under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license by L.Kenzel.
Both illustrations of Noah are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.)

Animal Attire, Fashionable or Not

In the latter third of the 20th century, as awareness grew about how many mammal species might be headed toward extinction, campaigns against the purchasing and wearing of furs emerged.  Such campaigns have helped increase consciousness about the very real danger of species extinction.  The campaigns, however, have sometimes led to stereotypes about the views of people in previous centuries, when animal furs and skins were more often used for clothing.

helping a bear
get warm

Our current fur controversies can easily lead us to associating the wearing of furs for clothing with being less appreciative of animals.  But in previous centuries, that was not always the case. Sometimes the reverse was true.  For example, in the early 1700's, a time in which there were no synthetic furs, Alexander Pope (1688-1744) reminded his readers to humbly remember that:

"... Nature's children all divide her care;

The fur that warms a monarch, warm'd a bear."

Indeed, as we go back further in the history of Western civilization, we often find a greater awareness and appreciation of our human dependence on animals to protect our vulnerable human bodies.  In Shakespeare's King Lear, the king comes upon a man who is without the usual protection of clothing, and turns that person into an object lesson, telling his own companions:  "Consider him well."  Then, speaking to the pitiable man, the king says, "Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool."  The king then reminds us all that, "... unaccommodated [unclothed] man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal..."

The origins of the very first human attire are lost in pre-history.  That inability to name the inventor of clothing, along with an appreciation of clothing, could even lead to understanding clothing as being a gift from God.  That perspective appears in the Adam-and-Eve story in the Bible's book of Genesis.  Ashamed after having disobeyed God, the two archetypal humans try to conceal themselves:  "They sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves."  (Gen. 3:7, NRSV)  This was probably a laugh-line to an audience who would have been well aware how scratchy fig leaves would be.  God, although announcing the sad consequences of humans' trying to be like gods, then extends grace to the helpless humans in the form of more suitable attire:  "And the LORD God made garments of skins for the man and for his wife, and clothed them." (Gen. 3:21, NRSV)

bear tracks in snow

An appreciation of animal attire can also expand to a wonder at the ways animals themselves are "attired."  A half-century before Pope reminded the monarch that a bear had been warmed by the fur he also wore, the naturalist John Ray (1627-1705) marveled at the appropriate variations in the protective covering of different species.  Ray did not yet have Darwin's explanation for how such variations had come about through the natural process of evolution.  Nevertheless, Ray marveled not only at the fur covering some mammals, but also at the insulating blubber of fish in cold waters, and the warming down some birds are attired with.

~~~

Do you notice any changes in Nature as winter comes?  How do you prepare for it?

(The quote by Alexander Pope is from

An Essay on Man, 1733-34, Epistle III.)

(The excerpt from King Lear is from Act III, scene iv, 195.)
(The children's illustration is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Finding the Thread of the Story

Long before there was the first written word, people looked up at the night sky and sensed that their life on Earth was part of a larger world, a larger story.  Once the rhythmic, circular movements of the sun and stars were charted, the mathematical harmony of that larger story came over time to be called "the music of the spheres" --  circular movements seeming to repeat themselves to eternity. However, in the 20th century, a different but also awesome story emerged from modern astronomers.  It is the story of how our universe began with a Big Bang, leading to the formation of galaxies, to our Sun, then to our planet Earth, and finally to life upon it.

Because that often-repeated narrative has come out of the discoveries of modern science, it seems so scientific, so objective.  Unlike ancient cultures' imaginative creation stories with their own messages to tell, the modern scientifically-based narrative gives the appearance of being just facts, not prejudiced by human desires.  Often overlooked, however, is one critical way in which that modern scientific narrative is unconsciously shaped by a human bias.

Think about it:  Why is that story of our universe, which begins with the Big Bang, always told with life on planet Earth as the outcome of its narrative?  Why is it told as a chain of events leading to the development of planet Earth?  A narrative could be constructed just as scientifically that would lead to planet X in galaxy Y, or to planet Z circling around one of many other suns in a different solar system.  The actual history of the universe is that of countless causes-and-effects scattering throughout the cosmos in innumerable directions.  Multiple chronologies, not just the one that leads to our home planet.

Thus analyzed, that often-repeated narrative about the universe that modern science has made possible reveals itself to be not totally objective.  But that is just as well.  After all, what meaning could it bring to us if we did not follow the thread of the story that leads to life on Earth and even to us?  The scientists who tell our modern story of the universe have thus revealed themselves to be not just scientists but also narrative-makers -- storytellers!  They have thus engaged in an ancient art.

Narratives are not simply an imaginative form of art. They can also be sources of knowledge. We humans can comprehend the world when we isolate threads that form a narrative.  The modern theologian John Haught speaks to this point when he writes:

"For human subjects the world is not experienced, at least in a rich or interesting way, apart from stories....  There is a narrative quality to all of our experience, and it is from stories, whether mythic or historical, that we acquire any sense or reality at all."

Looked at in still another way, one message of modern science's story of the universe is that out of the universe have emerged, of all things, storytellers!

~~~

Has your life been a story?  How?

(The Haught quotation is from Is Nature Enough?

  Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, by John F. Haught.  © 2006. p. 46.)

Loving Rain

The last half of the 20th century and first part of the 21st saw many spiritual writers who were widely read:  Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Thich Nhat Hanh, Kathleen Norris, and others. Although Thomas Merton is not my favorite (just a personal taste), there is part of one essay of his I like so much that I can return to it every few years.  It is that part in which he describes his experience of rain while he is alone in his cabin in the woods.

Merton's description of the rain is as good as about any nature writer's, but he puts a slight twist on his experience by interpreting the sound of the rain as being like speech:  "It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound.  It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms."  The heart of the significance of rain, as Merton understands it, is that rain is a gift, in contrast to a human society that has become increasingly commercialized.  Merton makes that point in the opening words of his essay:  "Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money.  By 'they' I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value...."

A "gratuity."  A gift.  To use a theological word, grace.

Many years ago, I noticed how in the U.S., weathermen on TV almost invariably described predicted sunny weather as "good" and predicted rainy weather as "bad."  What a narrow, city-centered viewpoint, I realized -- one that thought of rain mostly in terms of the inconvenience of driving on wet city streets.  Or temporarily avoiding them until the rain subsides.  (Only when droughts have been occurring in some areas do we have weathermen looking forward hopefully for rain.)  But any farmer knows that what is really needed are alternations of sun and rain.  And all our human lives depend on the farmer's success.

Thomas Merton depicted the rain he experienced as "a festival."  His use of that word made me remember a photograph I saw in Life magazine when I was a boy.  It was of children and youth in a city in India, dancing about outdoors, completely drenched by the first monsoon. They had been parched for so long that they knew rain was a gift, and knew how to celebrate it as a festival, even to the point of bathing themselves in it.

More than that, as I've come to celebrate rain, I can also celebrate it as being ecumenical. That fact was expressed well by one second-century Jewish Midrash (commentary) on a Biblical psalm.  To appreciate this statement about rain, we need to realize that in the Jewish faith-tradition, the central written teaching -- the Torah -- is celebrated as a great gift because it enabled people to create a community together.  Nevertheless, there is, as this Midrash, explains, an even greater divine gift:

"The sending of rain is an event greater than the giving of the Torah.

 The Torah was a joy for Israel only,

 but rain gives joy to the entire world, including animals and birds."

~~~

Do you have a memory of an occasion in which you experienced rain as a gratuity?

(The Merton quotes are from "Rain and the Rhinoceros"

 in Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton, © 1966.  pp. 9-10.)

(The Midrash is Midrash Psalms 117 and is taken from The Green Bible, © 2008.  p. I-99.)

Seeing What Animals See... Kind of

The contemporary author Andrew Parker writes:  "Today we live in a visual world."  It certainly sounds as if he's describing our contemporary urban societies.  Signs (mostly advertisements) sprout from every surface, all the way down to the tops of gasoline pumps.  Television (especially its commercials) uses more images per minute, trying to hold our attention .  Even our portable phones now use a visual screen.

stick insect
on end of a tree trunk

Andrew Parker was not, however, writing about modern technological societies.  Nor was the "today" he referred to even the past half-century.  Instead, his topic was what resulted from a development in biological evolution that began 500 million years ago -- the sense of sight. Parker's very next sentence describing some of this "visual world" also reveals that he is referring to the world of animals:  "There would be no such animals as stick insects, chameleons, or birds of paradise... if we did not [live in a visual world]." We have a clue as to what Parker means in that two of the animals he lists are familiar examples of camouflage:  A stick insect is hidden from predators because its body so closely resembles a stick.  A chameleon's skin changes colors to match that of its surroundings.

I enjoy watching shows such as PBS's Nature, whose cameras give me a peak into the world of such animals. On TV nature documentaries, however, the narrator usually talks about the evolution of the features of the stick insect, chameleon, or other camouflaged creature.  Andrew Parker points to the other side of the coin, which is equally important.  Namely, the evolution of vision in the predator who sees (or does not see) that camouflaged prey.

Those two sides of one coin thus demonstrate one type of what evolutionary biologists call co-evolution, which means that features of two species evolve in conjunction with each other. The two sides, camouflaged prey and seeing predator, evolved together -- each driving the evolution of the other. Camouflage is an example of one of the paradoxical forms of co-evolution. Part of the paradox is that predators have improved the evolution of their camouflaged prey, making what they want to catch harder to catch.  The paradox also extends to the other side of the coin: The increased camouflage of the prey improves the evolution of the predator species' eyes, making the prey easier to catch.  A sneeky, unconscious cooperation between what seem to be enemies.

This also means that as we look at Nature, a great deal of the diversity of appearances we see has resulted from the evolution of the eyes and power of vision in animals.  We see a world shaped by sight.  It also means that as I delight in looking at the almost amusing stick insect, I am also getting a glimpse into the vision and mind of whatever preys upon that insect.  Thus, in a way, I see some of what animals see... but only up to a point.  Through contemporary scientific research, we also know that some animals eyes can see things our human eyes cannot, such as the ultraviolet end of the spectrum.  To some degree, the worlds of other animals must remain their own, not meant for our eyes.

~~~

Do you remember every seeing an insect, lizard, or other animal whose color especially interested you?  Do you know why that species had evolved that way?

(The quotation by Parker is from Seven Deadly Colours, by Andrew Parker, © 2005.  p.265.)
(The photo of the stick insect is used under a under a
 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license [no name given].)

Of Slugs and Slime and Snails

The 20th-century naturalist Gerald Durrell wrote that one of his earliest recollections as a child was of when he and his caretaker were walking along a dirt road in India.  The earthen road was wet from rain.  As he explains, he saw "two huge khaki-colored slugs brought out by the rain.... I remember squatting down and watching them, enraptured, seeing them slide over the earth without any legs to propel them.... To me, they were not only fascinating but, in their own way, as pretty as [an Indian woman] in her beautiful sari."

Durrell's adult caretaker was alarmed, pulling Durrell away from the "filthy" things. Understandably, even though it aids their locomotion, the sliminess of slugs and snails can be a turnoff to us.  But if we are self-reflective, I think we might conclude that such a repugnance comes from a natural concern about mucous discharged from our own bodies.  We should not blame the little animals for that.

Although both slugs and snail are in the same class of gastropods (having a single foot-pad beneath them for locomotion), snails have an edge on engaging practically-minded adults.  Snails, besides being candidates as food (which we delicately call "escargot"), have aesthetically pleasing spiral shells, sometimes used for jewelry.

sea slugs ("nudibranches")

Meanwhile, as we humans eat our escargot and make jewelry, in the deep ocean, cousins of the land-species live their own ocean lives.  The parallel to our land slugs are called either sea slugs or nudibranches, some of which are highly colorful.  Those marine slugs and snails speak of the ancestry of gastropods going back half a billion years.

Although in our everyday life we usually encounter a lone garden snail or garden slug here or there, some species can live in great concentrations in their usually hidden world.  I remember a biology teacher on a field trip probing into the continually damp ground on a river embankment. He wanted to show us what he thought might be the greatest concentration of snail's possible -- tiny ones, less than 1/4-inch in diameter, crowded "shoulder to shoulder," if it could be said that snails have shoulders.

Am I the only child who, when first seeing a slug, thought that it must be a snail that had somehow lost its shell? Am I the only child who felt a concern for the slug, which looked terribly vulnerable without a protective "house" on its back into which it could retreat for safety?  I cannot believe I am the only child who had such thoughts.

Placing that childhood recollection of mine beside Durrell's childhood recollection, I see similarities in the caring about something and in the finding something to be wondrous.  My caring, and Durrell's wonder.  Both having an element of child-fullness.  Maybe wonder, like caring, comes more from the heart than from the head.

~~~

Do you have any childhood or adult recollections of slugs or snails?  What are they?

(The Durrell quote is from The Amateur Naturalist by Gerald Durrell, © 1982.  p. 9.)

(Photo of blue nudibranches is by Alexander R. Jenner; that of the brown slug by Guttorm Flatabø [user:dittaeva].

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licenses.)

A Dog Named Polly

Neither Charles Darwin nor his dog Polly made it to the cemetery of the St. Mary's churchyard, which was where Darwin had wanted to be buried.  St. Mary's was a centuries-old flint-stone church in the village where he had lived most of his life.  But Charles Darwin did not get his way because people outside his family intervened, convincing his family that his scientific legacy called for his being buried in Westminster Abbey, where scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton, and poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer had been laid to rest centuries before.

With Darwin's burial at Westminster, it was not just a scientist who was laid to rest, but also a veteran dog-lover.  When Charles's future wife Emma was being courted by Charles, one thing that attracted her was the kindness he demonstrated toward dogs and other animals.  During the course of his lifetime, Charles had a dozen different dogs.

Charles's daughter
 Henrietta
with Polly

The last of those dogs, and Charles's favorite, was Polly, a terrier.  She had originally been given to one of Darwin's daughters, Henrietta, but when Henrietta married and moved away, her dog remained behind with the family. Polly would usually accompany Charles on his daily walks on a sandy path around the grounds of the home.  And when he spent hours in his study doing scientific research or recuperating from illness, Polly would often be found nearby, resting on her dog-bed.  Charles's son Francis recalled that his father "was delightfully tender to Polly, and never showed any impatience at the attention she required."

drawing of Polly from
"The Expression of the Emotions"

As with other animals Charles encountered, Polly also became an object for Darwin's scientific observation. (Even Charles and Emma's children could not escape his scientific interest in human and animal behavior.) Darwin's aim was to find similarities between not only the anatomy of humans and animals but also between their bodily behavior and facial expressions -- similarities that would be additional evidence of common ancestry. That decades-long project of Darwin reached its apex in one of the later books of his career, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  That book contained a drawing of Polly, poised, pointing, with one front paw in the air.  The engraving was titled, "Small dog watching a cat on a table."

Polly, the pet who had become most deeply engraved in the affections of Charles Darwin's heart, died less than a month after he passed away.  Polly was buried under the apple tree near the Darwin home.  Being a dog, she would not really have been a candidate for burial in the graveyard of St. Mary's church, the place where Darwin also did not manage to be buried. And yet, then as now, pets were free of the complexities regarding cemetery plots, burial permissions, death certificates, and wills that can make human life complicated.  Nevertheless, Polly, being a pet, had helped Darwin make the case for his theory of evolution.  By including examples of the behavior of dogs, he had taken advantage of the similarities many readers had already observed between themselves and their pets -- animals with which they also had an emotional kinship.

~~~

Do you have a fond recollection of a particular dog?  What was the dog like?

(The quote by Charles Darwin's son Francis is from his "Reminiscences" in

 Selected Letters and Evolution of Origin of Species, ed. Francis Darwin, © 1892, 1958.  p. 74.)

(The drawing of Polly is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

Light from the Woods

Anyone who has seen a play by Anton Chekhov may well have felt that the characters were living in a locked room. Not a locked room of a murder-mystery, in which one of the characters must be the murderer.  Instead, a psychologically locked room, in which Chekhov's characters voice their failed dreams, never achieved projects, and unfulfilled desires.  In one play in particular, however, Uncle Vanya, a beautiful green illumination occasionally shines into the psychologically somber atmosphere.  It is the emerald light of a forest.  And it tells us something about Nature and the human spirit.

Twice in the play, the light glimmers through the voice of Dr. Astrov, a physician who every year has planted new forests.  Some of his lines seem to display remarkable foreknowledge of our current environmental challenges, especially given that the play was published in 1897.  For example, in Act I:

"The forests diminish year after year, rivers dry up,

 wildlife is coming to an end, the climate is spoiled...."

Astrov is able to express the beauty of forests, but only a very personal and individual way:

"When I plant a young birch and then see its leaves turn green

 and the way it sways in the wind, my soul is filled with pride...."

When he describes the human relationship to the forests in more communal terms, he is able to describe it only in a distancing or critical way because he is discouraged.  He quickly bores his distracted listener in Act III when he lays out on a table his series of maps charting the receding size of the forests over many years.  Also, his depiction of any combined life of humans and forests is only grim:

"What we have here is a degeneration, the result of a downhill struggle for existence....

 And so [man] destroys everything and never thinks about tomorrow...."

Thus, even though Astrov has nobly devoted much time and money to trying to sustain the forest, he cannot sustain a vision that will inspire other people.  Nevertheless, the green illumination that merely glimmers through him flares more brightly through another character, Sonya.  This is partly because she loves Astrov, but also because she is able to feel more loving toward all people. She is able to tenderly express a beautiful vision of how Astrov's reforestation work can be transformative:

"He says that the forests glorify our earth,

 they teach a person the meaning of beauty and kindle a spirit of majesty.

 The forests make the climate less severe.  In countries where the climate is mild,

 less energy is spent in the struggle with nature, and so there we find a gentler,

 more understanding person.  There too people are beautiful, pliant, and responsive;

their speech is elegant, and their movements are graceful."

Anton Chekhov

What does the playwright Chekhov himself think about these matters?  We have a solid clue in that he gives to Sonya the final words in the play -- the most beautiful and loving speech in the entire play.  We also have a more subtle clue in that the name "Sonya" is a Russian variant of the name "Sophia," which means Wisdom.

~~~

Do you know someone in whom the love of nature shines? Can you describe their spirit?

(The quotations from Uncle Vanya  by Anton Chekhov,

are from Anton Chekhov's Plays, translated by Eugene K. Bristow, © 1977.)

(A most accessible adaptation of the play is the movie version Vanya on 42nd Street.)

An Imaginary Island

In order to cultivate analytical thinking, philosophy teachers seem adept at devising situations we will never encounter.  (Such as:  "If you and two other people were adrift in a boat with no drinking water or food, but then one of those people died, would it be immoral to eat the body of the dead person?")

Despite the contrived nature of such thought-puzzles, there is one imaginary situation that still seems to evoke interest, even among non-philosophers.  It is the scenario of being stranded alone on an island.  I think that scenario engages our interest because it does not simply ask an ethical puzzle but asks us what we like most:  What would you want to have with you if you were marooned on an island?

My slim "Dover Thrift" book entitled Books and Reading: A Book of Quotations tells me that G. K. Chesterton was once asked what book he would want to have if he were stranded on an island.  The Bible?  A volume of Shakespeare?  No, Chesterton, replied he'd want to have a guide to shipbuilding.

It is a cleverly humorous reply.  But I think it ultimately evades the point of the "island question."  Namely, the question of what book is of most enduring value to you.  Surely Chesterton, if not on an island, would not want a book on shipbuilding to be his only available reading for the remainder of his life.

The "island question" does not, however, have to be asked or answered in terms of literal books.  The medieval theologian Meister Eckhart wrote:

"If I were alone in a desert and feeling afraid,
 I would want a child to be with me.

 For then my fear would disappear
 and I would be made strong.

 This is what life in itself can do because it is so noble, so full of pleasure and so powerful.

 But if I could not have a child with me
 I would like to have

 at least a living animal at my side to comfort me."

Meister Eckhart chose from the world's library a different kind of "book."  He chose what Christian tradition has called "the Book of Nature."  It has been considered to be a "book" so valuable that it can even be viewed as a window into God.

Meister Eckhart gave a different kind of answer to the "island question" because he looked deeply into himself, asking what was his most enduring need, not just what would be a quick fix to get out of the desert (or get off the island).  Interestingly, in looking into himself, Eckhart found that his need for belonging could be filled with the companionship of forms of life that were in some way different from himself:  A child.  Or an animal.

~~~

If you were marooned on an island, what things in Nature would you like to have around to comfort you?

(The Eckhart quote can be found in the theologian

Sallie McFague's book The Body of God, © 1993, p. 98.)

A Shawl Wrapped All Around

One of the first things I was taught about God (even before I entered elementary school) was that God loves me and everybody else.  Another of the earliest things I was taught about God (just as early in my life) was that God is everywhere.  I still hold to these two basic principles, even though I admit to the complexity of using that word "God."

But how can I ever imagine that God is everywhere?  (Especially when I have been cautioned against elevating anything in the world into a god, an idol.)  How can I ever imagine that anything is everywhere?

For me, growing up as a child, it was the sky that helped me envision how God could be everywhere at once.  God was invisible, but the sky, which I could see, expressed a kind of "everywhere."  When I stood outside and looked up and around me, the sky seemed to surround everything on the Earth.  As I scanned the sky and guided my sight back down to the Earth, the sky seemed to wrap around the edge of the Earth at the horizon, no matter which direction I was facing.

Today, I know of an open, inclusive church that has in its mission statement in the worship bulletin the phrase "God's all-encompassing love."  Even though I myself struggle with how anybody could actually love every person on this planet (so ornery do we humans often become), I do have a sense of what "all-encompassing" is.  I learned my sense of that from the over-arching, all-surrounding sky I could see when I was a child.

There was a second way, as a child, that the sky gave me a visual experience of "everywhere." For, after all, church-school had also reassured me that this God who loves me is with me no matter where I go.  I got a sense of "no-matter-where-I-go" by watching the sky as I rode in the car at night.  You can experience this yourself the next time you are riding in a vehicle at night (with someone else safely driving).  Look out the side window and notice how the objects here on Earth zip by.  A parked car flashes past the side window of your vehicle.  And there's a tree a little further away from the road, so it moves less quickly -- but even it first comes into view and then is gone!  That's how everything in life is:  Things come, and things go.

But now notice, in contrast, the moon or stars up in the sky.  Notice how they seem to travel with the vehicle you are in as it travels.  Just like God.

My high-school English teacher taught me not to mix metaphors.  But religion loves using multiple metaphors, and so I'm now going to do so.  I'm going to mix metaphors because I think this metaphor of the heavens wrapping all around us resonates with another metaphor used a few times in the Bible (such as Psalm 61:4 & Matthew 23:37).  Namely, the metaphor of God being like a caring mother bird sheltering her tiny chicks under her protective wings. We are like God's chicks.

~~~

Have you ever tried to imagine God "everywhere"?  How?

The Restraint of Insects

Most people in the U.S., I would guess, have heard of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, creator of "Peanuts."  A fair number of people have heard of Pogo's creator Walt Kelly.  Few people, however, know the name Don Marquis, who, in the first part of the 20th century, created the serialized humor of "Archy and Mehitabel."  In its time, that series provided witty comment on the human condition, usually through the eyes of an otherwise harmless cockroach named Archy.  I was struck by the perceptiveness of one of Archy's observations I recently came across in an anthology:

"if all the bugs

in all the worlds...

should sharpen up

their little stings

and turn their feelings loose

they soon would show

all human beans...

their relative significance

among the spinning stars."

green damselfly

Indeed, if human beings ("beans," as Archy pronounces it) could actually experience firsthand the bottled-up energy of every single insect in the world, we would quickly know we are outnumbered.  The best calculations are that insects outnumber the human population a million to one, and in total body mass outweigh the human population twelve times over. Moreover, what an enduring as well as versatile form evolution found when it developed the insect structure. We human beings walking upright are only one species; but the basic insect structure (3-sectioned body & 6 legs) comes in a fantastic array of a million species.  Some are as delicate as a damselfly.  Others, such as Goliath beetles, look like army tanks in comparison. Still others, such as walking sticks, are camouflaged as twigs.

ladybug

Given the incomprehensible number of insects worldwide, and the versatility of the class Insecta to evolve in almost any condition, the "if" that introduces Archy's poem is significant: Archy's scenario is imaginary. Insects are, for the greater part, much more concerned with leading their own lives than they are with harassing humans. Moreover, a mindless desire on our part to indiscriminately rid our planet of insects would mean the loss of bees and other insects that pollinate fruit and nut trees, and help pollinate other crops. Their roles as pollinators only hint at the vital links insects serve overall, being food for birds, some fishes, and many mammals.  Those animals in turn nurture the many cycles of air and soil. Not to mention the delight many children can get as they discover the animated wonders of usually harmless insects.

Archy, in his own restraint, merely implied another point.  Namely that, on the whole, the class Insecta has demonstrated more restraint in its behavior than has Homo sapiens.  Although we do need to find better ways to regulate the dangerous effects of certain insects, maybe we can add to our more restrained behavior a greater appreciation of the benefits of insects.

~~~

Have you every imagined what it would be like to be a certain insect?  Which one?

(The poem of Archy is from

  The Lives and Times of Arch & Mehitabel by Don Marquis, © 1935.)
(The photo of the damselfly by JDP90 [Joydeep] used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

A Kitchen with a View

One feature of many U.S. kitchens built in the 1950's is the placement of a window above the kitchen sink.  I recognize that such an arrangement could have been prompted in part by ergonomics, that science of designing workplace objects to fit the size and movements of a person's body:   Because we need to lean forward slightly to reach down into the bottom of a sink, we could hit our heads on a cupboard if it had been placed above the sink.  I am inclined to think, however, that another reason for that window is our general dislike of washing dishes by hand, contrasted with the soothing possibilities a view of Nature can provide when we look out the kitchen window.

Kitchens in middle-class houses built back in the '50's did not usually have automatic dishwashers as part of the original construction.  And in most families I knew, washing dishes was, let us say, not a beloved task.  (When, in the early 1960's my family briefly hired a maid to assist my mother with household work, my sister and I found the otherwise nice woman a bit peculiar when she explained that she would not cook but that she did love to wash dishes!)

I do not have many happy memories revolving around my washing dishes.  But I do have good memories about people enjoying that view out the window above the sink.  When I was a child and my parents were house-hunting , one thing that attracted them to the house they settled on was a graceful, flowering mimosa tree just outside the kitchen window.  And in our previous house, I lost count of the number of times my mother, at the sink, would remark upon a cardinal or other bird she noticed outside.  What my mother saw and commented upon expanded my own childhood knowledge and awareness of the world.  Today, in my own house, my wife and I have a low cherry laurel to gaze upon, delighting ourselves with the antics of the squirrels that clamor upon it.

I know an architect who says he just cannot imagine designing a kitchen without a window above the sink -- it just would not be the courteous thing to do.

In E. M. Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View, a window-view becomes both the source of the book's title and a symbol for the book's theme of the struggle between social insularity and openness.  The upper-class heroine, not yet married, and on vacation in Italy, finds that the hotel room she is assigned to lacks a good view.  A gracious middle-class man offers to switch rooms so that she might have a window with a beautiful view.  Who will she marry? That generous man's son, or a man who is of her own class but who is shallow? Those social questions are Forster's primary concern, but the relationship with Nature is a sub-theme.  The cinematographer's who made the 1985 movie version took advantage of that sub-theme:  When the young woman, vacationing away from cold England, opens the shutters on that new window she agreed to accept, the beautiful and warm Italian sunshine floods into the room.  And more than light floods into her as well.

~~~

Do you have a view of some aspects of Nature through a window where you live?  Is there a favorite thing you like to see?

Stranger and Truer than Science Fiction

Sometimes after watching an episode of the Star Trek TV series, I think that the designers of the space aliens' costumes and makeup need to go back to school, so to speak.  Not to a costuming course in drama school.  And not to a makeup academy.  Instead, they need to return to fiction-writing school to give more thought to what an alien that developed on another planet might even be like.

I tend to think this way not after reading an astronomer's analysis of conditions on other planets.  Instead, my thoughts incline this way after seeing pictures or reading about forms of life in the ocean on our very own planet Earth.  Evolution has come up with some "costumes" and "makeup" far beyond the imagination of any science-fiction writer or director.  And the strangest ways of being a living being can be found in our oceans.

Just take the matter of virtually all space aliens on Star Trek having two symmetrical sides, right and left (just as do humans and all other vertebrates).  A simple exception in the ocean to such symmetry are male fiddler crabs, which have a claw on one side of their bodies much larger than the claw on the opposite side.  (Thus the whimsical appellation "fiddler" we have given them.)

Nature had already gone a step even further away from requiring animals to have two sides when the invertebrates previously evolved.  Sea anemones, sponges, and jellyfish are all circular in design.  Imagine a Star Trek director instructing a person in a spherical costume to "face the camera."  Evolution had an even greater imagination when it came up with the starfish's "costume," giving it five arms -- an odd number, of all things.

Another area in which I think science-fiction writers have been outdone by Nature has been in that of eyes.  I have seen a TV space alien made up with one additional eye on its forehead, or even with an extra pair.  (It would take more work to mask over the actor's real eyes and give them a single, centered eye, like the Cyclops in the ancient Greek epic Homer's Odyssey.)

Contrast that prosaic eye-on-forehead thinking with the idea of a whole ring of small eyes around a circular cookie-shaped body.  To make that many-eyed circular costume even stranger, don't space the tiny eyes at even intervals, but place some a little closer together and others a little farther apart.  That is the approach actually taken by the blue-eyed scallop of Australia. Moreover, what a colorful touch in the pinhead eyes being blue!

Now, please don't misunderstand me.  I am not really trying to criticize science-fiction writers.  I do recognize that science fiction is really more about our human societies than it is about what exists on other planets.  (I also recognize the limitation of trying to make an alien costume that allows a person to fit inside.)  My aim is not criticism but amazement.  I am amazed at the immense variety of "costumes" of the beings in our oceans, demonstrating again that life's possibilities are even greater than our own human imaginations.

~~~

Do you think we might draw a lesson from the strange variety of species?  Or would that be carrying our imaginations too far?

One Sun and One Moon

The reading of a poem by a designated poet has now become a regular part of U.S. presidential inauguration ceremonies. The first reading was at the inauguration of JFK in 1961.  The already well-known and highly esteemed poet Robert Frost brought a copy of his new poem "Dedication" to read.  No inaugural poet has had to face the elements and imperfect technology the way Frost did.  I remember watching on TV. Frost stood at a podium where an electrical fire had been put out; a bitterly cold wind rattled the sheets of paper he held; and the intense sun blinded his eyes.  The sun won out.  And so, unable to read further, Frost finished by reciting from memory an older poem, "The Gift Outright."

Over the past decade or so, inaugural poets have been less known, but that has not meant that their poems, usually written for the occasion, have been forgotten.  I remember in particular there having been quite of bit of favorable comment about the poem "One Today" read by Richard Blanco at the Obama inauguration in 2013.  The comments about the poem afterwards on radio and TV showed how it had been especially accessible and meaningful to many.  In his poem, Blanco employed the opening image of "one sun" rising in the eastern U.S. and moving across the continent to depict and tie together the varied lives of people as they awoke and arose to their day's regular activities.  Occasionally, a specific detail added depth to the more general descriptions:

"My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors,

...on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives --

to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did...."

The poem continued the theme of unity by using the phrases "one sky" and "one moon."

That modern poem came back to my mind when I recently read, of all things, an 8th-century Buddhist stanza.  It was by Yung-chia Ta-shih, and goes like this:

"One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures,

One Reality, all comprehensive, contains within itself all realities.

The one Moon reflects itself whenever there is a sheet of water,

And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one Moon."

Even when I was in early elementary school, and read introductory books about astronomy, scientists knew that the planets of our own solar system varied in whether they had one moon, no moon, or more than one.  Astronomers' inventory of our universe is now so vast that we have numerous examples of the variety of moons that orbit about each planet in many planetary systems.  We also now know that other planetary systems sometimes have not a single star but a star system at their center.

If our own solar system did have more than one sun, or if our Earth had more than one moon, I would hope we would still have poets to remind us that we are all ultimately one people.  And also have poets to at times stretch our minds a little farther, by reminding us that all Life on this planet is ultimately One Life.

~~~

Is there some way you try to come back to an awareness of our unity amidst differences?

(The Japanese print is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)

(The Buddhist verse is taken from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, © 1945, p. 8.)
(The 2013 poem "One Today" by Richard Blanco can be read at this external link:  "One Today".)

Big Skies

My wife grew up in a moderately hilly landscape in Michigan.  When she first moved to a city on a flat, coastal plain, she missed the open vantage points that had been provided back home by the tops of hills.  And so, she found herself appreciating the freeway overpasses as substitutes. Nevertheless, the shortcomings she experienced in a flat terrain were offset by a payoff:  Being on a flat landscape made the sky seem exponentially larger.  And so, my wife immediately recognized the experience the 20th-century American author Willa Cather had described in one of her novels.  Of flat New Mexico, Cather wrote:  "Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.... [T]he world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky."

Seeing the vaulting sky above a flat terrain is like viewing a movie on a wide screen in a movie theater, as contrasted with watching it on an old-fashioned, confined TV screen.  Although experts on movie history tell us that in the 1950's it was the need to compete with television that prompted the creation of CinemaScope and Panavision, I wonder if it was not also the popularity of westerns at that time.  Those wide-screen formats were perfect for depicting the grand open plains during U.S. frontier history.  Even though one 1952 western could not escape critics' pointing out its mediocre content, the movie's title recognized the power of the majestic ceiling above that open land on which the humans traveled.  The movie's title was simply "The Big Sky."

Not that a wide view of the sky is always delightful.  I remember as a kid road trips in the family car when a wide view of the sky revealed the vastness of storms developing on the horizon -- no way to steer around them!  As I remember that image of threatening skies, I also recall a part of U.S. history that most of those movie westerns barely mentioned.  Namely, that as European-Americans expanded outward and westward under a big sky, they confined native Americans to smaller and smaller pieces of land.

Our American love for wide, open spaces continued from frontier times even into the 20th century.  That love paralleled those 1950's westerns, as post-World War II suburbs sprawled out from cities more heavily on their western sides.  People still moving westward, still hungry for something.

Beneath the saga of U.S. history -- as told through the lens of our relationship to a big sky and a wide horizon -- lies, I think, a broader human desire.  It is the desire to feel that our lives are not constrained.  It is the desire to feel that the possibilities for life are so wide that they reach out to an unconfining horizon.  If that is so, what we might really need is not simply to look out across a greater distance, but to pause and look up more deeply into the sky, and into ourselves as we do so.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The sky is the daily bread of the eyes." If that is so, maybe what we need is not just a larger portion of sky but the habit of savoring it more deeply and more thoughtfully.

~~~

Whether your physical vantage point is confined or more open, are there any occasions during the day when you look at the sky?

(The Cather quote is from Death Comes for The Archbishop

 by Willa Cather, © 1927.  Book VII, Ch. 4.)

(The Emerson quote is from his Journals entry May 25, 1843, as quoted in

 A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, ed. Barbara K. Rodes, et al., ©1992.  68.44.)

(Stormy-sky photo by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos used under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Unported 3.0 license.)

The Secret Lives of Mushrooms

Probably even before I was in kindergarten, my parents warned me that the mushrooms that occasionally popped up in neighborhood yards should not be eaten because they could be poisonous.  To emphasize the point, they explained that you could not tell by appearance whether the mushrooms were poisonous or not. And so, when cooked mushrooms were first served up to me on my dinner plate, I simply looked at them, thinking, "You cannot tell by their appearance whether they are poisonous or not."

Although I now know a bit more about mushrooms, I wish I had learned more about them back then.  I might have appreciated them more.  There is a lot most people do not know about these strange beings. In fact, mushroom "plants," for the most part, lead secret lives.

I referred to mushrooms as "plants" in the preceding sentence, putting the word in quotation marks because they are not classified by biologists as being in the plant kingdom. They do not have green chlorophyll to convert sunlight into sugar through photosynthesis, as do trees, shrubs, and grasses.  Instead, mushrooms are a sophisticated form of fungi, serving a role in the creation of rich soil.  What we see above ground are the reproductive bodies occasionally "flowering" up from the base below ground, producing spores rather than seeds.  (Perhaps it was the sudden appearance of mushrooms at night that led to mushrooms having been associated with fairies.)

I did omit one detail in my confession about being afraid to eat cooked mushrooms:  As kids, we did not usually call them "mushrooms." We said "toadstools" instead.  That name engaged my childhood curiosity.  I think I secretly hoped that I might catch sight of a small toad comfortably seated on top of one of the "stools," even though toads were farther and few between than mushrooms where we lived.  (Is there any end to the things a child wishes for?)

Having now gotten well beyond my childhood caution about possibly dying by poisoned mushroom, I have a couple of times picked one, but not to cook it.  Instead, I wanted to get a closer look at the underside of the cap.  Hidden there are what seem like a hundred thin leaves radiating out from the center, all looking like the fanned pages of a book.

In illustrations in children's books, mushrooms have been part of the imagined world of exotic animals, elves, and fairies.  When mushrooms rise from the rim of the unseen body below ground they sometimes form a rough circle, imagined to be a "fairy ring."

As a child, I never really believed in fairies. Nevertheless, I do like to occasionally think about silent mushroom bodies living their own lives below the surface of the ground.  Millions of them, all around the Earth.  Silently living and waiting.  Unhurried.  Waiting not for us, but for the right conditions to reproduce.  Just as they did for over half-a-billion years before there were any humans around to hurry, and to believe.

~~~

Have you ever been surprised by suddenly appearing mushrooms?  Where?

(The photo of the pair of mushrooms is by Ezhuttukari.

The photo of the clusters of small mushrooms is by Stu Phillips.

Both are used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses.)

Of Nests and Love and Nurturing

It is a tale of tender, parental care -- among both humans and birds.  It is also a tale of love, even among the birds, dare I say, even if instinctive.  The story will eventually lead to the family of a virtually forgotten 19th-century author.  But let me begin with the matter of those birds.

The contemporary naturalist David Attenborough, in his TV series and book Life on Earth, pointed out how so much of birds' instincts, behavior, and time expended is centered on nurturing one thing:  the egg, and, of course, what comes from it.  He wrote, "Birds... have to incubate their eggs and that is a very dangerous business."

Now shift back over a century to the Centennial Exposition of 1876, a world's fair held in Philadelphia.  Among the exhibits was a display of the now famous artwork of John James Audubon, who introduced Americans to many of the birds of the North American continent. The critical link in this story is that among the fascinated viewers of Audubon's art was a twenty-nine year-old woman named Genevieve Jones.  Audubon's work engaged with two of her own interests.  Growing up, she had learned watercolor painting from her mother. And she had collected bird nests while accompanying her doctor father on his buggy rounds to patients.

Genevieve Jones

"Gennie" Jones became captivated by the idea of creating a book similar to Audubon's but covering the 130 species of birds that nested in the state of Ohio, where she lived with her parents. She hoped such a book would enable people to do something she had been unable to do as a child -- identify such nests as that of a Baltimore oriole.  The immense project was undertaken, with Genevieve and a friend learning how to make the life-sized lithographic drawings.  Her brother helped collect nests, and her father financed the project.  Neighborhood girls helped hand-color the prints.

Then tragedy struck.  Only two years into the project, with only part of the book published,

Genevieve caught typhoid fever and died.  Nevertheless, just in the way that birds do not abandon a nest after one of the chicks dies, the Jones family committed themselves to completing the project.  The mother learned how to make illustrations more scientifically precise than she ever had.  The technology of the time required transporting the sixty-five-pound printing stones to a printer 50 miles away in Cincinnati. After seven more years, the project was completed. Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of the Birds of Ohio, with text by Genevieve's brother, was published in 1886.

The full story of Genevieve Jones, her family, and their book is told in America's Other Audubon by Joy M. Kiser (© 2012).  I am struck by how the matter of parental nurturing weaves throughout the tale:  Birds nurturing their young in nests.  The parents of Genevieve nurturing their daughter's love of art and of Nature.  The entire family contributing to the Illustrations of Nests project.  And all of that nurturing symbolized by those all so natural nests.

~~~

Do you have any remembrances of nests or of birds nesting?

(The quote about birds is from

 Life on Earth by David Attenborough, © 1979,  p. 195.)

The Earnestness and Frivolity of Flowers

The painter Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "A flower is relatively small."  And yet she depicted them as being enormous!  Her easily identifiable paintings of flowers, which were one of her favorite subjects later in her career, often depict a single, huge, brightly-colored flower spilling over the edges of the canvas.  One of O'Keeffe's flowers can cover a hundred times its square-area in real life.  A biologist could easily appreciate that out-of-scale depiction, although for biological rather than aesthetic reasons.  After all the flower was a revolution in the evolution of life on planet Earth.

Green plants with photosynthesizing chlorophyll did exist on our planet before there were flowers.  However, it could take those conifers over a year to produce seeds snugly nested in cones.  One revolution flowers brought (when they evolved 100 million years ago) was the ability to release a seed in only a month.  That was an explosion in reproductive capability. That flower-explosion also brought about a revolution in the prehistoric world of animals.  As flowers evolved into different shapes, the insect world evolved simultaneously, new insects being adapted to take advantage of new food-source shapes.  In turn, bird and mammal species found new food in the flowers, seeds, and insects, thus putting competitive pressure on the older species of dinosaurs.

Today, understandably, few people are thinking about such significant events in the history of planet Earth when they purchase or pick a flower.  Flowers can be an earnest business for commercial flower-growers and florists.  But it is a flower's enjoyable color, fragrance, and shape that capture an average person's attention.

True, flowers do sometimes become a part of solemn ceremonies.  A wreath of flowers can soften the hard edge of a coffin, thus soothing the hearts of the bereaved.  Despite the flower's fragility, symbolizing the transitoriness of life, its reproductive associations bring a hint of life into the acceptance of death.

More frequently, however, flowers shout out "life!"  The humorist Mark Twain made the earnest observation that "Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole."  Over a century later, men wear boutonnieres much less often. But the symbolic tie between flowers and restored life endures.  All the way down to anti-war demonstrators inserting flowers into phalanxed soldiers' rifle barrels.

With their colorful intensity and their message of new life, specific flowers have gained a role as a prominent symbol in many of the world's faith-traditions:  The lily of Easter resurrection in Christianity. The lotus of life-giving tranquility in Buddhism. And the light-giving Golden Flower in Taoism.

For the billions of bees and other insects who search for food each day, flowers are a serious business.  But for most people, flowers are just plain fun!

~~~

Where do you encounter flowers?  Do you have any favorites?  What do they express?